But in the sweaty depths of this night, Dexter dreamed. The images were as twisted as the bedsheets: Lily Anne holding a knife in her tiny fist, Brian collapsing into a pool of blood while Rita breast-fed Dexter, Cody and Astor swimming through that same awful red pool. Typical for such nonsense, there was no real meaning in any of it, and yet it still made me vastly uncomfortable on the bottom shelf of my inner cabinet, and when I finally staggered out of bed the next morning I was very far from rested.
I made it into the kitchen unaided, and Rita thumped a cup of coffee in front of me, with not nearly the care she had shown arranging Brian’s cup. And even as I had this unworthy thought, Rita picked up on it, as if she were reading my mind.
“Brian seems like such a great guy,” she said.
“Yes, he does,” I said, thinking to myself that seeming is very far from being.
“The children really like him,” she said, adding to my undefined sense of discomfort, which my pre-coffee partial consciousness had done nothing to dispel.
“Yes, um …” I said, taking a large slurp and silently willing the coffee to work quickly and get my brain back online. “Actually, he’s never really been around kids before, and—”
“Well, then, this will be good for all of us,” Rita said happily. “Has he ever been married?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Don’t you know?” Rita said sharply. “I mean, honestly, Dexter—he is your brother.”
Perhaps it was my newfound human feeling erupting, but irritation at last pushed its way through my morning fog. “Rita,” I said peevishly, “I know he’s my brother. You don’t need to keep telling me.”
“You should have said something,” she said.
“But I didn’t,” I said, quite logically, though admittedly still a bit cranky. “So can we change the channel, please?”
She looked like she had a lot more to say on the subject, but she very wisely held her tongue. She did, however, undercook my fried eggs, and so it was with a sense of real relief that I finally grabbed Cody and Astor and fled out the door. And of course, life being the unpleasant business that it is, they were stuck on the same page as their mother.
“How come you never told us about Uncle Brian, Dexter?” Astor demanded as I pushed the car into gear.
“I thought he was dead,” I said, with what I really hoped was a note of finality in my voice.
“But we don’t have any other uncles,” she said. “Everybody else does, and we don’t. Melissa has five uncles.”
“Melissa sounds like a fascinating individual,” I said, swerving to avoid a large SUV that had stopped in the middle of the road for no apparent reason.
“So we like having an uncle,” Astor said. “And we like Uncle Brian.”
“He’s cool,” Cody added softly.
Of course, it was very good to hear that they liked my brother, and it really should have made me happy, but it did not. It simply added to the sense of mean-spirited tension that had been rising in me ever since he had appeared. Brian was up to something—I knew it as well as I knew my own name—and until I knew what that something was I was stuck with my sense of lurking dread. It had not gone away by the time I dropped the kids at school and headed into work.
For once there were no freshly discovered headless bodies lying in the streets of Miami and frightening the tourists, and as if to underline this great mystery, Vince Masuoka had even brought in doughnuts. Considering the ragged assault my home life was making on me, this was very welcome indeed, and it seemed to me to call for some positive reinforcement. “Hail, doughnut, well brought,” I said to Vince as he staggered in under the weight of the pastry box.
“Hail, Dexterus Maximus,” he said. “I bring tribute from the Gauls.”
“French doughnuts?” I said. “They don’t put in parsley, do they?”
He flipped open the lid to reveal rows of gleaming doughnuts. “No parsley and no escargot filling, either,” he said. “But they do include Bavarian cream.”
“I shall ask the Senate to declare a triumph in your honor,” I said, quickly grabbing one. And in a world built on the principles of love, wisdom, and compassion, that would have marked an end to the very uncomfortable course my morning had been following. But of course, we live in no such blissful world, and so the doughnut had barely had a chance to settle happily into my stomach where it belonged, when the phone on my desk began to rattle for my attention, and somehow, just from the way it sounded, I could tell it was Deborah.
“What are you doing?” she demanded without saying hello.
“Digesting a doughnut,” I said.
“Do it up here in my office,” she said, and hung up.
It is very difficult to argue with someone who is already off the line, as I am certain Deborah knew, so rather than go through the huge physical effort of redialing, I headed to the Homicide area and Deborah’s desk. It was not, to be fair, actually an office at all but more of an area within a partition. Still, she seemed in no mood for the quibble, so I let it lie.
Deborah was in her chair at the desk clutching what looked like an official report. Her new partner, Deke, stood over by the window with a look of detached and vacuous amusement on his unreasonably handsome face. “Look at this,” Deborah said, smacking the pages with the back of her hand. “Can you believe this shit?”